With its eye-popping Art Deco design and screenwriter Ayn Rand adapting her own novel, “The Fountainhead” is one of the most bizarre and interesting major studio releases of Hollywood’s Golden Era.

Directed by King Vidor, the movie stars Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal, with production design by Edward Carrere and cinematography by Robert Burks (who began his long association with Alfred Hitchcock that same year with “Strangers on a Train”). “The Fountainhead” is an over-the-top, outrageous movie. It’s hard to tell if the filmmakers considered this a serious drama or a satire.

Decide for yourself with a rare screening of the Library of Congress’ restored 35mm print at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts at 1 p.m. Sunday, June 17, as part of its annual Architecture and Design Films Showcase, which runs through July 1.

No matter whether it is satire or drama, it works. “The Fountainhead” is a movie that has total belief in itself, from its off-kilter imagery that crescendoes into a special effects money shot of Cooper’s Howard Roark lording over Manhattan at the top of a skyscraper under construction, to its twisted sexual triangle involving the uncompromising Roark, Neal’s depressed heiress Dominique Francon and scene-chewing Raymond Massey’s compromising newspaper baron Gail Wynand.

Even Rand’s screenplay, clunky by any measure — more of a series of ideological speeches than actual dialogue — works within this design.

And design is indeed the word for it. Vidor, one of Hollywood’s greats stretching back to the silent era, understood the material and designed rather than directed the film. He incorporated Carrere’s geometric set designs, which mixed Scandinavian and international influences, with his camera angles and movement. Even his direction of his actors is broad and theatrical, befitting the visual style.

Rand, who wanted Frank Lloyd Wright as production designer (he turned it down), hated Carrere’s work and Vidor’s direction.

But Vidor was the right choice; he was the most experimental of the Golden Era’s A-list directors, with an impressive list of low-budgeted niche movies to complement his big-budget hits. In fact, his visually adventurous silent film “The Crowd” (1928), which also has a skyscraper motif, is a spiritual companion to “The Fountainhead.”

Of course, Rand is a hero to the right. House Speaker Paul Ryan is a particular fan, and has cited “The Fountainhead” philosophy of makers and takers. But unlike the novel, the film is less about politics than the ideal purity of creativity and artists, and the temptation of compromise.

Francon: “I wish I had never seen your building. It’s the things that we admire or want that enslave us, I’m not easy to bring into submission.”

Roark: “I don’t build in order to have clients. I have clients in order to build!

You see, regular people aren’t depicted at all in Vidor’s “The Fountainhead.”

•Other highlights of the Architecture and Design Films Showcase include “Tall: The American Skyscraper and Louis Sullivan” (1 p.m. Saturday, June 16; also June 23) about the 19th century rise of skyscrapers and the role played by Sullivan, a mentor of Frank Lloyd Wright; “Big Time” (7 p.m. Saturday, June 16; also June 23), which follows Danish architect Bjarke Ingels over a five-year period as he struggles to complete Manhattan skyscrapers W57 and 2 World Trade Center; “Brasilia: Life After Design” (3:30 p.m. Sunday, June 17), which looks at life within the Brazilian capital, which was created in the 1950s but seems out of step with modern times; and “Columbus” (5:30 p.m. Sunday, June 17), last year’s excellent feature film directed by Japan’s Kogonada and starring John Cho as an architect’s son who finds himself stuck in Columbus, Ind., a small city with a visionary design that was once featured in National Geographic.

Michelangelo Antonioni: In April, there was a great daylong event at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco with a retrospective of five of the Italian master’s greatest films presented by Luce Cinecitta in restored prints. Now comes the sequel: A 21/2-month comprehensive respective of Antonioni’s career begins at the Berkeley Art Museum’s Pacific Film Archive with his landmark 1960 classic “L’Avventura” at 7 p.m. Friday, June 15.

All five films that showed at the Castro are in the BAMPFA retrospective, again in collaboration with Luce Cinecitta, but there is so much more, from early works from the 1950s as he was developing his style (“Story of a Love Affair,” July 1; “Le Amiche,” July 14) to documentaries (“Chung Kuo China,” Aug. 26, a 1972 look at Mao’s China) to later works post-1980 (“Identification of a Woman,” Aug. 19; “Beyond the Clouds,” Aug. 24) as well as short films he continued to make throughout his career (programs on Aug. 1 and Aug. 11).

First up is his thematic trilogy of modern alienation that begins with “L’Avventura” (also screening June 28 and Aug. 22) and includes “La Notte” (7 p.m. Wednesday, June 17; also Aug. 25) and “L’Eclisse” (June 20, Aug. 29).